Data builder

FBS data builder is a specialist
interactive system for professionals and researchers. It allows direct
interrogation of
Farm Business Survey (FBS) data to construct user defined tables.

County data in FBS data builder

Where possible we try to present results for counties by type-of-farm - although sometimes there are insufficient
farms in the sample to do this.

This because there
are around 1900 farms in the whole
survey, and in fbs data builder there are 38 distinct 'county' classifications (plus one, for all the other
'metropolitan counties and unitary authorities'). In addition we have 14 distinct farm types. This gives
546 cells in a table for 'FarmType * County'. Or 3.5 sample farms for each cell of the table - which is far too few
for a reliable estimate. Reliable estimates for such samples will be mostly unavailable because the confidence
intervals (plus or minus the SE*1.96, for 95%) increase as the sample gets smaller,
so the confidence intervals will be far too big in such cases.

Because users are often motivated,
despite the limitations of the sample and specific advise from us, to frequently
request 'county*farm type' - instead of choosing a bigger geography like GORs or FADN Regions - and so very often
getting no data at all, as well as an unfavourable impression of our service - we removed the option to choose the
dimension 'County'.

However, as you will see below some data is available, if the queries are appropriately structured.
We hope that this will meet the needs of most users who are interested in data about farming in
a particular county.
You are welcome to contact us, if you feel there should be county data available for your particular query,
but please take note that the data is very limited and mostly has relatively large confidence intervals.